Leaving Jetty Road (7 page)

chapter eleven

Running

A
s the rain grows heavier and the wind gets colder—as we wrap up in our tartan winter-uniform skirts and blazers—I take up running.

There’s no doubt about it: exercise helps you lose weight. I’ve lost ten pounds now, since Easter—which is more than I’ve ever managed to lose in my life. Even my mother, who’s the queen of dieting (that is, the queen of yo-yo dieting), would be proud of that number. And people have started to notice, believe it or not. For the first time ever, I’m getting all these
compliments.

One day in the rec room, even Sofia says, “Being vegetarian really seems to suit you, Lise. You look great.” Then she grins, leans over to me, and whispers conspiratorially, “So tell me your
secret,
Miss Mawson.”

I’ve lost ten pounds . . .

“I don’t know,” I lie. “Maybe all those lentils and tofu
are
good for you after all.”

“Hmm,” she says, a look of distaste crossing her face. “Think I’ll stick to pasta and cheese.”

The bell rings then, three times. I stand up, stretch, glance out the window.

“Look at the way Miss Stirling runs,” I say to Nat and Sofia, pointing through the window across the schoolyard to a figure hurrying toward the staff room.

“Late again—”

“The woman’s always in a rush.”

“No, but look at the way she
runs,
” I say impatiently, trying to get my point across. “She barely lifts her feet off the ground. No wonder she’s such a pathetic gym teacher.”

Nat empties orange peels out of her lunchbox into the rubbish bin. “Since when are
you
the expert on running?”

“I run,” I say indignantly, before I can stop myself. “Every morning, before breakfast.”

Sofia and Nat look at me in astonishment.

“You must be joking.”

“Since when?”

I can see what they’re thinking. Is this
Lise
we’re talking to? Round, lazy Lise, who took up piano in Year 11 so she could avoid after-school athletics?

“It’s
good
for you,” I say crossly, and walk away.

But the other thing about exercise, apparently, is that it kills your appetite. That’s what all the health magazines say. I have to admit, I thought that was as good a reason as any to get serious about it.

What gave me the idea to take up running—as opposed to something else, I mean, like swimming or cycling—was Nat’s mother. I was over there one day a few months ago and Mrs. Jordan came into Nat’s bedroom to say hello. She stood in the doorway, chatting, asking me how I was, what was going on in my life—all the things she usually asks me when I’m over. She was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and she had a headband around her forehead, so I asked her if she was going off somewhere to play sports. The question just came out, without me even thinking about it. It’s always been like that for me with Nat’s mother: I’ve never felt remotely shy with her. I don’t know why. Somehow, she’s just so easy to talk to.

“I’m going for a run,” she told me, in answer to my question.

I was surprised. “I didn’t know you were a runner.”

“I used to run marathons when I was younger,” she said. Then she sighed. “I’m not supposed to run at all now, really. Bad knees—from all those marathons, no doubt. But sometimes I just miss it. Running makes you feel so
good.
”

So this year, when I decided it was finally time for me to get fit, running was the first thing I thought of.

At first I hated it. I couldn’t get my breath, had to keep stopping and starting as I passed through the streets that follow the tramlines. It was so
cold,
too. The mornings are freezing now: your breath floats ahead of you in a cloud, and your skin goes all rubbery and pink. I couldn’t
believe
how unfit I was.

But then one day I found my rhythm. As simple as that. And it’s the most amazing feeling. Now I know exactly what Mrs. Jordan was talking about.

These days, it’s the part of the day I most look forward to. I set my alarm for half past five, get up at twenty-five to, change into my track pants, and have a glass of water on my way out through the kitchen. I jog slowly to the end of our street, warming up, then turn the corner and speed up as I head toward the bread bakery on the corner of the main road.

My route goes along tree-lined avenues by the tramline, past Italian people’s houses with backyards full of grapevines, and ramshackle stone cottages rented out to uni students and people on the dole. There’s a little brown dog that sleeps on the porch of a corrugated-iron cottage on the street where I turn around to go back home; he always wakes as I run past, and shakes himself. By the time I come past him on the way back, he’s waiting at the tin fence at the end of the driveway, his wet black nose poked, quivering, through the gap between the bottom of the gate and the cement. I was scared of him at first—I’ve always been a little afraid of dogs—till I realized he only wanted to see who I was.

The thing I like about running: it’s the only time my mind switches off, feels quiet. It’s as if, for once, I’m in tune with myself. As if the world has retreated and there’s just me and this rhythm: the rhythm of my feet on the pavement. It’s almost like meditating.

By the time I come back, the bakery’s always well into its working day. The aroma of baking bread fills the air; it’s the most delicious, tempting smell. It makes me think of the crusty white loaves my mother went through a phase of making when Terri and I were little, before she started working full-time. She’d sprinkle them with sesame seeds and give them to us fresh out of the bread machine. And we’d sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor, tearing the bread into huge chunks, chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing. No matter how much you ate, you always wanted more.

Every time I run back past the bakery, I think about this; and every time, I tell myself I should run home another way. The smell’s almost
too
good; it makes my knees go weak and my stomach rumble. I slow down and take deep breaths, filling my lungs with the warmth and the sweetness of it.
Just as good as eating it,
I tell myself as I turn the corner onto our own street.

But the moment I reach the entrance to our white-walled two-story house, the good feeling inside of me vanishes. I stop just inside the high wrought-iron gate; do a few hamstring stretches and lunges, trying to ignore the feeling of slow dread that creeps over me. Then I trudge up the gravel driveway, past Mum’s real estate sign at the front (positioned so that people will see her name and phone number as they drive past). When I get to the back door, I walk through, hot and breathless, and Dad’s standing there in the kitchen, doing up the buttons on his shirt, his pager beeping furiously.

The worst way of all to end the morning is when Terri’s there, too, yawning cheerfully over a mug of coffee at the countertop, telephone already cupped between her shoulder and her ear. Even in her baby-blue terry-cloth bathrobe, her eyes still puffy from sleep, she looks gorgeous. She has straight blond hair; long, slim tennis player’s legs; and eyelashes that look as if they’ve got permanent (unsmudgeable) mascara on them. I can still remember a colleague of my dad’s gazing at Terri and me across the dinner table one evening, years and years ago, and saying, in this faintly amazed voice, “They’re just so
. . . different.
You’d never guess they were sisters.”

He was right, of course. And it’s not just looks, either. When she was at school, Terri was one of those students that private schools dream of: she was a straight-A girl, a member of the varsity tennis team and junior varsity field hockey, a good enough piano player to be picked for every music competition, an elected student council rep in Year 12. In fact, she was
—is—
the kind of person with so many talents and gifts that you’d expect a little selfishness, a little arrogance, in her, as a matter of course.

But that’s the thing about Terri that I find most difficult of all, even though I know I shouldn’t. Because she just doesn’t have a speck of meanness in her. She’s warm, and friendly, and generous; and she always sees the best side in other people, never doubts there’s something good there. She’s just all-around
. . . nice.
You can’t help liking her; you just can’t. Even
I
can’t.

Which is usually the last thing I want to be reminded of when I come back from my run, trying desperately to hang on to that wonderful, fleeting feeling of well-being . . .

Once I’m in the house I walk quickly through the kitchen, not saying hello to Dad or Terri. I ignore my reflection in the mirror opposite the kitchen countertop as I walk through to the hallway. The
last
thing I want to see after feeling so good back there on the street is my face, pudgy and red, and the way the tops of my arms are so round and
. . . flabby.

Because that’s when the questioning, the noise, starts up again in my mind: meditation time well and truly over. Tell me,
tell
me: why is it that no matter how fit I get, my body doesn’t seem to look any more toned? At twenty, thirty miles a week I’d be almost as fit as the girls on the athletics team by now, surely. Yet I look—and
feel—
as wobbly as I always have.

And I’m hungrier than ever, too. I don’t know what’s wrong with me: all this exercise hasn’t killed my appetite at all. I eat my bowl of muesli in the morning (a third of a cup of muesli, and enough milk to moisten it, but
no more;
and if no one else is in the kitchen, I thin down the milk with a little bit of water, to make it less fattening). But by ten o’clock in the morning, I’m starving. Sometimes the last lesson before lunch goes so slowly that I’m actually shaking with hunger by the time the bell goes . . .

And I feel so
guilty
for being so hungry. Whatever happened to discipline? To will? Don’t I have any self-control at all?

I tell myself, over and over, that I just need to exercise more. Or to eat less, so that my stomach has the chance to shrink.

Or maybe, maybe, I just need to be less
greedy . . .

chapter twelve

Secrets

S
omething strange happened this month. My period didn’t come. I waited and waited, thinking it might be late. Now June has come and gone, and there hasn’t been a sign of blood—not even a trickle.

Of course, they’ve been drumming it into us at school since Year 7 that when a girl’s period stops it’s one of the first symptoms of anorexia. Every year, they hand out these pamphlets in health education, which say that losing your period is a sign that you’ve lost too much body fat, that your body is starving. Apparently, all the calcium in your bones gets leached out; it’s to do with hormones, like estrogen or something. According to the pamphlets, it can even cause osteoporosis later.

One in every hundred girls,
Mrs. James, the health ed teacher, always says to us warningly.
It could be your friend next. Or YOU.

Well, there’s a girl in our class who had to go to the
hospital
last year because she was anorexic. Jessica Fuller, her name is. I remember watching her as the year went by: she came back from the Christmas holidays looking heaps slimmer than before, and then, incredibly, she just
went on
losing weight. By the middle of the year, she was so skinny you could see all the vertebrae in her spine poking out, right up to the top of her neck. Her shoulder blades stuck out through her sweater like the sharp edges of an ax, and her cheekbones were steep ridges in her face. She weighed seventy-five pounds, or something amazing like that.

And she’s not the only one. There are other girls at school whose skirts hang off their hips. I mean, let’s face it, it’s hardly a rare disease.

So . . . so much for our wonderful health education classes. So much for all that great information they gave us about periods. None of that stopped Jessica and Co., did it?

I got my period when I was twelve. It took me completely by surprise—Nat hadn’t had hers yet, and Terri, who’s a year older than me, had only just started herself. And the truth is, I was too embarrassed to tell Mum. I didn’t know what to say to her; I felt my body had let me down, betrayed me. In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone. I went to the supermarket and bought some pads with my pocket money and kept quiet. I tried to pretend it had never happened. Every
month,
I pretended it hadn’t happened.

Then one day, when I was fifteen, Mum came into my room while I was packing my bag for a school camp. And there it was: a box of tampons sitting on the carpet beside my bag. I’ll never forget the look that crossed her face: astonishment first, and then, bewilderingly, hurt.

“How’ve you been paying for them?” she asked at last.

I told her.

“You didn’t have to do that, Lise! You
know
I pay for Terri’s. They just go on the shopping list whenever she needs them.”

I didn’t say anything. I felt ashamed all over again—as if I’d let her down, both by having a body that did stuff when she wasn’t ready for it to and, even more, for not having told her. For not having
shared
it with her.

“You should’ve let me know,” she said, finally, getting up to leave my bedroom, the angry, hurt expression still plastered across her lipsticked face. “Did you think I’d never ask? Didn’t you think I might be worried about you?”

And, of course, I
hadn’t
thought of that. The idea never even entered my head. Which was yet another reason to feel ashamed of myself.

Anyway, I know it’s not anorexia that’s made me miss my period this month. It
can’t
be; for one thing, I’m not thin enough. Besides, I read somewhere recently that there are other reasons your period can stop suddenly—like playing a lot of sports, or being under stress. What with all the running I’m doing, plus all the studying we have to do this year and the exams and stuff, I figure there are plenty of other good reasons I seem to have missed my period.

In any case, I’m far too greedy to get anorexia. Have you ever heard of an anorexic who craves food all the time? Who thinks about it day and night? Who
never
stops feeling hungry? I don’t think so.

Because I’ll never forget what Jessica used to say last year if you offered her food. Even when she was really thin—even just before she went into the hospital—she’d look at you with this strange, trapped expression in her eyes. As if you were hassling her, somehow. And she’d say loudly ( just as she still does now, in fact, if you offer her something like a piece of cake or a cookie), “No, thank you. I’m not hungry at the moment.”

I honestly can’t imagine myself ever being like that. I like eating too much. I just
do.

On the last day of the semester, before the midyear holidays, Mr. Garvolli hands back our end-of-semester chemistry tests. He gives them out in sadistic order, from best paper to worst. I wait as he hands them back. Counting:
one, two, three . . .

There are twenty-eight people in our class, and my test comes in tenth. I used to be in the top five of the class. Always.

And at this moment—at this moment, in front of all these people—I am the closest I’ve been in
years
to crying. I take a deep breath. I stare at my desk, open my eyes wide, don’t let myself blink. My cheeks get hot; I can feel an ugly pink flush crawling up my neck, over my cheeks.

Don’t blink, don’t blink, don’t blink . . .

It’s not as if I don’t know why I did so badly this time: the Fear came back again during the test. It took me twenty minutes to calm myself down, to be able to hold my pen firmly enough, without shaking, to write. I had half an hour left to do the test. Half an hour: that’s not enough for
anyone
to do well in a test. No matter how hard they studied for it.

For several minutes, I struggle with myself.
(Don’t cry. Don’t CRY.)
But I win. By the time the bell rings, my eyes are dry, my cheeks normal. All under control. I even manage to smile at Sofia when she bumps into me in the locker room on her way to the cafeteria.

“Hey, Liso,” she says, pushing her ponytail back over her shoulder. “What’s up?”

“Nearly holidays,” I say lightly. “Let’s celebrate. What’s for lunch? Chocolate doughnuts?” (
As if.
I can’t remember the last time I had a chocolate doughnut.)

You see? Nowhere
near
tears.

Which means I’m okay for the moment; for a little while longer, at least, I’m safe. And if I can just keep following the rules
—Don’t cry. Stick to your diet. Get fit. Study hard. Don’t let on who you really are—
everything will be all right.

Because, I tell myself, the thing about these rules is . . . they are the things that will make other people like me. They are the things that will make me proud of myself.

They are the things that will keep me in control . . .